Patient's privacy and confidentiality of personal information is taken very seriously. Most caregivers strictly follow redundancy and compliance to try to be legal, with mixed results. In today's health care system one of the backbones of the industry seems to still use paper. Paper is used to write patient demographics, insurance and the responsible adult for the first time visitors. Paper may be used for a variety of applications such as recording any pre-existing conditions and recording proof of immunization. It is almost a double standard since the imaging portion of medicine (radiology) went through a film revolution whereby removing the film dependency and going fully digital. Requirements from government and standardization bodies further put the burden on the caregivers to produce more paper so as to validate their compliance.
The caregivers have identified paper generation as a great hindrance in their delivery of effective medicine. While efforts such as digitized record keeping and computer-based office organization systems is abound, paper documents are still used, especially as it pertains to patient interface. Example embodiments of this invention intends to break this barrier by using workflow and methodologies that not only provide sufficient functionality to the caregiver but also can readily be accepted by the patient and be supported in a mobile environment.
Around fifty percent of individuals have access to a personal computer on a regular basis while around ninety percent of patients currently use a cell phone. The use of a portable device as the primary interface to the health care system is advantageous in many aspects. The technical aspects of using a portable device for an intelligent health record management system revolve predominantly around security and authentication. The embodiments of this invention enhance biometric authentication mechanisms for this purpose. First, a certain individual needs to be authenticated so as to either access or provide the permission to access a private health record. Second is the replacement of the health provider's clipboard where patient demographics and health history is usually recorded. Both of these aspects are presented as a mobile feature to further reduce response time and in turn increase efficiency, which is the primary derivative of the embodiments of this invention.